How confident should you be that AI content is treated as 'Google friendly'

How confident should you be that AI content is treated as "Google friendly"

Since the introduction of Generative AI content tools, there's been no shortage of warnings about using them to create content for your website, particularly if it's being used as an SEO tactic.

There's numerous examples of websites seeing unbelievable ranking and traffic gains from scaling content production using AI, only to see equally unbelievable, and catastrophic, drop in traffic and rankings when "google eventually punishes" the practice of AI generated content.

Google's position on AI content

First off, Google has said numerous times over the last 4 years, "AI Content is fine". They have been clear that the use of AI is not, in itself, against its guidelines.

Danny Sullivan on repeated occasions has said the same thing: Google has not said AI content is bad.

Google's current guidelines state the very same thing – how the content is produced is not of concern. What is produced is their focus.

It's clear, their primary care is about the quality and purpose of the content that is published to the web. But they do also say: content created primarily to manipulate search rankings may breach their policies.

So, there is important nuance:

As with all things SEO, nuance is important. We need to take notice of the specifics around Google's guidance.

• Google is not penalising sites because "AI was used to create this content"
• Google penalises because it has assessed "This content has been published with the sole purpose of manipulating search rankings"…it being produced by generative AI is irrelevant.

The dramatic falls in traffic shared alongside warnings of using AI are real. It's just the content is assessed determined to provide no value to end users. It's not helpful, it's not quality, it's likely not even accurate. Google doesn't like content like this; it never has and will eventually devalue it when it finds it.

Are there types of content that AI content isn't good for?

We're fairly set that anything deemed thought leadership, or requiring hands on knowledge and experience to talk about, should not be produced by AI. These are topics that Google will assess for EEAT and are most likely to cause issues if they've been produced solely by AI.

Confidently Google friendly content

Content that we broadly refer to as functional or contextual content is where using AI to produce the copy excels.

In straightforward terms, content that exists on the page to explain, or add context of the purpose of that page, or content that help a user carry out a function, are ideal uses of AI so long as:

• The content you produce is not straight out of the tool without being elevated with your own data or insight (see our process for doing this, here)
• The content has been updated to adhere to your existing content's style and tone of voice
• The content actually serves a purpose, for example helping a customer make a purchase decision or providing accurate FAQs

These examples are perfect to produce quickly, and accurately with AI and quality checked by humans before publishing. Because the content should only be produced to help the user understand or do something, means the pages the content is produced for have a genuine need to exist.

We have a tried and tested process for producing Generative AI content, that has delivered success for over four years – with clients benefiting from sustained SEO growth, quickly. Which, pre-generative AI days, was possible to do, it was just slower, more expensive and consumed resource that already has many demands on it.